October 14, 2006,
Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City, Utah, 2006)
I was reading “The Road,” the new novel by Cormac McCarthy, when a passage jumped out at me:
He pulled the boy closer. Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that.
You foget some things, don’t you?
Yes,you forget what you want to remember and you remember what you want to forget.
The words rolled around in my head for a day or two, bumped up against some of my old memories and some new ideas and, well, that’s where columns come from.
I thought of the day a student challenged poet William Stafford. He told Stafford that he could listen to profanity, racial slurs, sexist talk and not be affected by it at all. Stafford thought a moment. Maybe so, he finally said, but you can also hear a loud noise a few times and not be affected. But you hear it day after day, pretty soon your ability to hear is gone.
Like most people, I carry a lot of junk around in my head. I still remember the first dirty joke I heard in grade school, and I remember the kid who told it to me. I remember the times when voices have been raised against me. I remember the times I’ve been sworn at.
But those moments aren’t the times that bother me. I can deal with those. What troubles me are all the times — long forgotten by me — that I filled someone else’s head with junk or sounded a loud noise that affected their ability to hear.
Does my son remember the day I swept the cat off the table and into the refrigerator door?
I’m sure he does.
Do my stepdaughters remember the day I got exasperated with their mother on a family trip to California?
I’m sure.
I think we all underestimate the sensitivity of other people. As the Japanese author Dasai once said, there are people in the world who are so fragile, they can cut themselves on cotton swabs.
Mahatama Gandhi, the great sage of non-violence, tried to guard against ever injuring others. He felt any kind of aggression was abusive. He also told the story of the time he was teaching grade school and dealing with the behavior of an unruly boy.
He became so frustrated at one point, he says, that he reached out and struck the boy. Needless to say, the kid was horrified. The great, non-violent Gandhi had used violence against him.
Gandhi says the boy immediately changed his ways. He became a model student. Yet, till the day he died, Gandhi said he regretted that blow. He knew the students in the class that day would remember the incident for the rest of their lives. Like the rest of us, he had sounded a loud note that made people a little more deaf. He had stuffed a piece of junk into the heads of young people at the school. And, as McCarthy says, it would be there forever. And they would remember it, whether they wanted to or not.
Gandhi slipped up once. I’m willing to cut him slack for that.
I slip up on a daily basis.
Will people cut me slack?
I’m banking on their patience.